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recommend reliable hard drives..
MonMotha:
You don't want RAID 0. You want RAID 1. RAID 1 is mirroring. In RAID 1, all but one drive can fail, and you're still OK. The performance and size of the resulting array is limited by that of a single drive (yes, you can improve read performance at the cost of potentially not catching errors, and some controllers offer this).
RAID 0 is striping with no redundancy. In this configuration, if any single drive fails, you lose everything. However, it combines the performance and size of all the drives together.
As for drive failures, I've not had one in several years, now, other than drives that were >10 years old when they did finally fail. I guess I'm either lucky or I treat my drives nicely (or both). It probably helps that I don't generally use external enclosures as those tend to get bumped around a lot. I don't think that they're of lower quality (the drives are often not even powered on before they leave the factory, but this applies to all drives). I think they're just subject to more mechanical and electrical abuse.
Of course, I still keep backups. I also tend to keep my drives reasonably cooled. My last "failure in its prime" was a 100GB (IIRC, around that) Maxtor, back when Maxtor was still a separate company. They even grumbled when I asked for a replacement under warranty. I've had decent luck with Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi (formerly IBM; actually seem to be very reliable if you avoid the "Deathstars"), and Samsung in various applications from desktop to home server to commercially used arcade games (which is probably the worst possible scenario for a hard drive).
ALWAYS keep backups. Drives are so cheap, now, that there's no excuse for not having them. Perform a test restore every now and then to make sure your backup process works.
drventure:
You know. I knew I'd get that wrong (Raid 1 vs 0) when I wrote it. Well, at least I did say "Mirrored" :-[
Monmotha's right, you want MIRRORING not STRIPING.
Blanka:
Forget RAID, set up a good software mirroring program. RAID can make drives unreadable if one of the 2 drives died or if you put one of them in another computer or USB case. A software cloning program, works with every new drive, even across a network or with external USB disks. Nobody has such demanding drive access for personal use that a RAID setup is needed. Try automatic cloning with the free multiplatform Synkron or so.
Blanka:
Beside the mirroring, another positive thing of a software mirror is that the disk don't have to be in the same case. You can keep one at your office, with your parents or so.
MonMotha:
My servers generally run RAID 1 for hot-failure tolerance (one drive can die and the system keeps running through it) and various methods for backup, including disk imaging.
Disk imaging/cloning is a handy "total backup" method (and it makes for an easy restore!), but it won't keep the system running if the primary drive fails. Of course, you probably don't care about this in most home applications, and it gets you a proper backup (with incremental and/or offsite capabilities, if you want) without the need for a 3rd drive in the mix. RAID is more about availability than guarding against worst-case data loss. It's not a total backup solution as it ONLY guards against drive failure. It won't save you from errant file deletion, while a proper backup will.
As cost is generally more of an issue on my desktops, and power/space is an issue on laptops, my desktops and laptops only have one drive that backs up to either an external or, more commonly, a server (which itself is backed up off-site and with "back in time" capabilities, as well as generally having a RAID 1 setup for availability).
I do usually just use software RAID. This means I'm not tied to a weirdo controller (that probably is just software, anyway). I can access my RAID array from any Linux system.
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